Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.

Title: Inside the Fed

Subtitle: Monetary Policy and Its Management, Martin Through Greenspan to Bernanke

Author: Stephen H. Axilrod

Narrator: Neal Vickers

Format: Unabridged

Length: 10 hrs and 35 mins

Language: English

Release date: 02-06-17

Publisher: University Press Audiobooks

Ratings: 3 of 5 out of 1 votes

Genres: History, American

Publisher's Summary:

Stephen Axilrod is the ultimate Federal Reserve insider. He worked at the Fed's Board of Governors for over 30 years and after that in private markets and as a consultant on monetary policy. With Inside the Fed, he offers his unique perspective on the inner workings of the Federal Reserve System during the last 50 years - writing about personalities as much as policy - based on his knowledge and observations of every Fed chairman since 1951. He describes, for example, Arthur Burns's response to political pressure from the Nixon White House and Paul Volcker's radical shift to an anti-inflationary policy at the end of the 1970s - a transition in which Axilrod himself played a crucial role. As for the Greenspan years, Axilrod points to the unintended effects of the Fed's newfound "garrulousness" (the plethora of announcements and hints about policy intentions) - one of which was the Fed's loss of credibility in the aftermath of the chairman's 1996 comment about "irrational exuberance". Great leadership in monetary policy, Axilrod says, is determined not by pure economic sophistication but by the ability to push through political and social barriers to achieve a paradigm shift in policy - and by the courage and bureaucratic moxie to pull it off.

Critic Reviews:

"Informative and insightful, this view of the inner workings of the Fed will appeal to anyone with an interest in economics or curious about the organization's recent progression." (

Publishers Weekly)

Members Reviews:

Inside View

Axilrod's second edition of Inside the Fed provides an illuminating view of the Federal Reserve with especially good coverage of the Great Inflation era of the 1970s to early 1980s. The best aspect of this book is the insight into the individuals who made monetary policy decisions and the view of insider's on the practical limits of the Fed's power. While this second edition discusses the Great Recession and the events leading up to it, this section does not benefit from Axilrod's intimate, day-to-day knowledge of the key players.

A few areas of the book appeared underdeveloped. A more critical view of the Fed and its role would have been beneficial to the reader. Axilrod's criticisms, to the extent they are present, are generally in the vein of "the Fed should have done more" when many of the criticisms are directed from the angle of the Fed's intervention causing the problems that it then sets out to solve. Second, there is almost no critical examination of the efficacy of combining monetary policy with the regulatory enforcement fuction of the Federal Reserve. Many of the arguments in favor of having an independent monetary policy entity (e.g., to avoid the pressure of the electoral cycle) are completely contrary to the notion of a transparent administrative agency.

Disorganized and poorly written

After trying very hard to find something redeeming in this book, I gave up after about fifty pages.

I still know no more about the history of the Fed or how it conducts its duties than prior to the point when I picked up this book.

The author puts an endless flow of words to paper, but never manages to actually say anything of any substance.

I follow business and economic news very closely.